The Virtuous Physician? Towards a Renewed Hippocratic Ethics

Abstract

In this paper, the possibility of a renewed ethics of the role of the physician is explored by appeal to the Hippocratic tradition. The Hippocratic Oath, in its many permutations, offers a unique historical example of a document that marks the boundary-crossing of the physician-in-training into the office of physician, properly speaking. In making the Oath, the physician or physician-in-training enters into a new maturity that develops out of his or her own subjective desires and constructs, through to an outlook that is bound to a transcendent ideal of both technical acumen in the chosen profession of the physician, but also in a zeal for that which is good or virtuous. In other words, the Hippocratic tradition focuses the maker of the Oath upon a moral good; both for the physician and also for the patient. It may be years of practice and reflection before the significance of the Oath is realised in any particular medical professional. The Hippocratic tradition calls physician and patient alike towards a higher, but also more realist sense of virtue – in its ordinary and everyday sense, and the manner in which the good may be perceived even in the messiest of life and death conundrums. In this sense, a Hippocratic ethics of the physician might be possible that shows how the notion of ‘dirty hands’ is misleading, but also promising, in terms of the ethical possibilities for renewed notion of the virtuous physician.

Citation

Zimmermann, N. (2015), "The Virtuous Physician? Towards a Renewed Hippocratic Ethics", Conscience, Leadership and the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands’ (Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 173-182. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-209620150000013011